This Is How Horribly U.S. Teachers Are Actually Paid (HBO)
Posted
January 30, 2019
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93,198
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January 30, 2019
93,198
1,469
799
2.43%
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3:38Now PlayingOver the past year, public school teachers across the country have walked off the job, demanding better resources and higher pay. After a successful six-day teacher strike in Los Angeles earlier this month, teachers in Denver, Virginia and elsewhere in California, are either protesting or getting ready to strike.
For teachers, the dissatisfaction about their wages is grounded in a very simple economic reality: over the past 25 years, teacher salaries have not kept up with those of other workers with a similar level of education and experience.
This "teacher pay gap" reached a new high in 2017: public school teachers are now paid some 19% less than their peers. And the states that have some of the largest pay gaps in the country - like Arizona, Oklahoma or Colorado — are the ones where we've seen the biggest surge in teacher activism. Economist Dr. Sylvia Allegretto, who studies the phenomenon, says this happened because public school budgets that were cut during the Great Recession weren't upped or reinstituted during the economic recovery that followed.
"The issue we're really talking about here is that we have a constant defunding of teacher pay as we have an erosion of public investment in the public school systems more generally. So that really plays into a labor market that has been broken for a long time, for a lot of people," Allegretto explained.
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